Wazzat: Discover the truth about Quern’s past, unfold the mysteries of its present, and be the explorer who shapes its future. Quern introduces reusable puzzle mechanics to the classic genre, making the player think about the game as a whole, and not just as a series of individual challenges.

Makes with the working

V-

Where does this game get off nomming 6+ GB of RAM?

FERPS are all over the damn place, ranging from 70+ to sub 30 within inches of each other.

However, it’s still completely playable.

J-

Had to edit the prefs file in order to change the resolution of windowed mode. Shaaaaaaame.

P-

I wanted to give 4 chairs to a Unity game here, for once, but it seems I still can’t.

There’s no Unity screen of Nope, granted, but the performance is a crapshoot

Look a certain way, 100FerPS, turn 10º to the right 30 FerPS.

What in the actual fuck? Have you not heard of culling? Or simply not rendering things which the player can’t see and probably won’t be able to see for a long long time?

Total-

Shiny / Sounds

V-

Savage Lands much?

Yeah, it really has that everything is slightly grainy filter on it.

Even so, it’s not ugly and it’s nice to see something not made entirely with Unity assets.

Draw distance is a bit shite (live Savage Lands)

Even in the first area, such moutain pop-in.

Sounds are there and the voice acting works but this is something that begs to be played with K-pop blasting into your head organ.

Than again, that might have been my problem… more about that in the fun section.

J-

Though the framerate is hella inconsistent, it does paint an good looking and eerie setting

Good use of atmosphere

Yeah, it’s using the savage lands filter, but if it works it works

The voice acting is alright.

If you end up looking out in the distance through the telescope you find, you’ll see lots of weird texture pop-in in the distance

P-

It looks good, very good!

Everything is detailed and seems to have been designed with a lot of care.

The background music, with the ubiquitous exception of a pair of tracks, is also what you’d expect from a puzzle game and they do seem to be completely unintrusive.

Except for those two weird ones that sound so out of place I ended up muting the background music altogether and listened to the Enya best of playlist on youtube instead.

I noticed something at one point and I have never been able to unhear it.

The “footstep” noise has exactly the same cadence whether you’re walking or sprinting and just add insult to immersive injury, they don’t give you a separate footstep slider.

For me, I either play the game dead silent, or that is always niggling in the back of my mind.

“Why are you paying attention to footstep noises instead of the puzzles?”

I’ll tell you why, in the Fun section.

Total-

Control

V-

Standard gerbil + keyboard lot.

The second camera activation took some time to get use to.

Inventory / Notes management is a solid PITA.

J-

Dinging it a chair because of the finicky mouse wheel inventory, but beyond that I have no real complaints. Solve puzzles

P-

Invisible walls, the game.

I get that there are some places where this makes sense. realMyst did it too.

But why can’t I jump over a 1’ palisade/hedge/fence/whatever?

There was growing sense that I’m being herded by this game, instead of – you know – playing it.

I didn’t feel like a player, anymore than I felt like a player in the Star Wars sim-thing in Disneyland when I was 9.

I didn’t feel like I was in control… at all!

I was just pushing the buttons and sliding the blocks to make the next set piece happen.

Technically speaking, there’s nothing wrong with the controls in Quern.

You can rebind most of them, except for the movement keys.

But they’re already mirrored between WASD and the directional arrows, so that’s fine.

The mouse sensitivity slider actually works so that’s always a plus.

But for a game with technically sound and functioning controls, I don’t feel like I’m control at all.

Total-

FUN

V-

We’re not the A Team, more like the D- Team.

That said we all have our own special set of skills.

Mine however is NOT solving puzzles in a strange world.

You start off at Thor’s Hammer and get a note saying you were abducted because reasons.

After that it’s full-metal here’s some puzzles, have at!

Unfortunately I’m either out of practice branding on puzzles or pants-on-head retarded.

I’ve sorted a few but yeah, I’m basically stuck on the first area.

That’s not a bad thing however.

It’s been awhile since a game called me a moron and was able to back it up, hard.

Quern – Undying Thoughts did just that and I’m looking forward to sorting it.

J-

I can see the appeal of this sort of game

Quiet, atmospheric, solve some puzzles. Have a good ol’ time

I’m not one of these people who finds this sort of game appealing

I actually busted out a pad and paper for one of the puzzles. This is not a good sign

Most of the nice things I’ve said about this game, I’ve said in the shiny and sounds section. I just didn’t have fun with the game

Flailing around, feeling dumb. I play video games because they provide escapist fantasies, not to re-inforce my daily life

P-

And this is the kicker, the reason I started noticing the footstep sounds and their unwavering cadence, is because I spent more time trying to find the puzzles than actually solving them.

I’ve played Myst. I’ve played Riven, I’ve played Uru and I even played Uru Online, the multiplayer one.

In none of those games did I spent 30 minutes going around the same places over and over wondering “WTF do I do now?”

A good puzzle game, and I’ve said this before, hands the player a proverbial loaded gun and then sits back with a bag of popcorn and watches the idiot shoot himself in foot over and over.

That’s the Stephen Sausage Roll approach.

Quern tells the player there’s a loaded gun somewhere in this stupidly pretty and over-designed island, expecting people will go through the trouble of finding it so that they can proceed to shoot themselves with it for a bit.

Fuck. That. Noise!

There’s good puzzle design and then there’s being asinine. Guess which one this game fits into…